CD Projekt RED - Development Costs

Polish Legal/Law Journal site (thanks Kodaemon and Perscitus for the heads up), Gazeta Prawna, has revealed some interesting information about the development cost of The Witcher 2, as well as the development for both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

During CDPR’s conference, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kicinski said that The Witcher 2 cost $10.36 million to CD Projekt RED.

In addition, Kicinski revealed the The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 will cost CD Projekt RED $2.82 million for the first half of 2013.

No wonder TW/TW2 couldn't get GOTY anywhere. Judges were bought! Hell if my vote counted, I'd take millions from Bethesda and vote for bug-o-rama over both TW2 and DX:HR!

Yes and let it be a life lesson on why triple game budgets are bloated. All you have to do is look at Call of Duty for another example.

The best part of the story is this.

“We already have an agreement with Warner Bros and we’re conducting further negotiations. We’ve divided the globe into areas, allowing optimal financial conditions in different territories. In total, we want to have upwards from ten distribution agreements. In addition, we want advance payments from distributors for each geographical area as a contribution and expression of faith in our product.”

What’s also great here is that CDPR has achieved financial independence. According to Kicinski, the company has $8.32 million which allows financial independence.

Kicinski concluded:

“Currently, we are working on two large productions (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077) and two smaller titles (the first one will launch after the new Witcher). We need a financial base to fund our publishing plans. This gives us financial independence, which is a key factor to success. It’s good to have a financial background in this industry. It allows you to work on even cooler projects and maintain a high margin, since you don’t need to depend on advance payments from distributors”

-- "If I've ever offended you, just know that from the bottom of my heart, I really don't give a shit."

Remember that the game was developed in Poland, not USA. Poland is certainly not a poor country, but it doesn't have the salary levels of the US. $10M is a serious amount of cash in Poland, especially since it's safe to assume most of it was spent on salaries.

High paid developers with bloated salaries usually buy a lot of crap they don't need, hence their bloated salaries. If they earned a FRACTION of their bloated salary, would learn the lesson Polish and Russian developers already learned. Live on scraps and try to do quality work: suffer, starve, etc.. Still it is possible to develop from a FRACTION of western budgets, as we have seen.

It is weird that this article says that it cost $10 million for TW2 and an earlier article said that it cost $6 million. Is one in a different currency or did someone get it wrong in one of the articles?

Don't worry. I don't believe in anything posted on facebook, twitter, linked in nor any other such site. In fact, I'm ignoring anything that's written there. Too bad yuck selfads you can find there can't be used in the toilet like normal yellow pages.